About Me

This page is an overview of who I am, my experience as an IT professional, and values that mean a lot to me.

As a youngster I started coding as a hobby on the Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, Apple II c, e, gs. This interest led me to code by trade since 1996. Throughout my career I have worked for corporate, collegiate, and government institutions through roles ranging from developer to project and organizational management.

The majority of projects I've worked on have been start-ups. My primary talent is taking ideas and turning them into full production stacks.

In addition to my profession I am graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a proud U.S. Navy veteran.

How I Work

Kindness & Respect In regards to the people I work with - what matters most to me is treating each other with kindness and respect. I have learned that communicating and understanding each other makes work fun and productive.

Stability I am dedicated and therefore only want to work for stable companies, teams, & projects. Like you, I have responsibilities and it can be distracting having to worry about providing vs. being focused on a cool feature.

Transparency I like to see and understand how things work. By the same token my confidence is stronger when I know everyone involved is on the same page. Transparency allows a group to think as one.

Results Oriented Adult day care frustrates me. Unfortunately its very commonplace. This is a topic that I am very fond. I believe in a ROWE and have not found a more productive environment.

Work History

Rouxbe.com2014-Present
This is my current home and the newest addition to my family. Rouxbe is the web's dominate online cooking school with an emphasis on wellness. I love working at Rouxbe not just for the people I work with but for the subject matter and how it helps people. This is the first company I've worked for where the focus is on a person's quality of life vs. profit. Even though I've been at Rouxbe for a while now I still can't shake that honeymoon feeling of working for a fresh company and new material.

Contactability.com2011-2013
I love Contactability because it is a SaaS currently for the lead generation industry. This was a fun platform to build because of that excitement one gets from working on a green pasture project. While getting Contactability off the ground I lived on-site Monday-Thursdays and slept on a cot in a cubicle camp I setup (remember I said I was dedicated).

InsuranceAgents.com2011-2012
I was an individual contributor for InsuranceAgents.com mainly helping out with their Ruby apps. IA was a mix of Perl and Ruby - the former holding a large backend presence. IA was a big data company with a lot of high performance systems that required the highest reliability - minutes of being down were strongly felt.
IA did really well and was eventually acquired by Bankrate.com. By the time of the acquisition I had already been working on a new project that would become the subsequent start-up - Contactability.com.

Trail10.com2010-Present
After leaving MT I formed up Trail10 to organize my contracting career. Trail10 has led me to some cool people and projects. I mainly work on light to medium size coding projects with Trail10 depending on what my full time responsibilities and work load is.

MachineTools.com2005-2011
MT brought me back into the start-up world. It was stable, active, and a family. At first the subject matter was foreign to me but eventually got into it. We underwent a large project of migrating a 10yo monster stack into Ruby on Rails and launched without a hitch. I really grew at MT and eventually became the CTO. As CTO of MachineTools.com I managed an on shore team as well as off shore teams in India and Russia which worked on a side startup project.

Government & Corporate Gigs2001-2005
The .com bubble popped which tossed me into school => military => corporate life.

SoulIntegration.com1997-2001
Artificial Intelligence was the focus at Soul Integration. We primarily created custom intranets but also specialized in the automation of whatever we could get our hands on (store, construction company, automotive inventory, etc.).

IOS Communications1996-1997
I built and maintained web sites for IOS which was one of the town's ISPs. IOS was unique because we used an early proprietary hypertext preprocessor which allowed us to create complex dynamic web sites, CMS, and web apps.